Taxidermy
Artworks and objects that use preserved animal skins mounted over forms to recreate the look of living creatures.
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About
Taxidermy preserves an animal's skin and mounts it over a sculpted or padded form, with glass eyes, to give an impression of life. Its methods developed in the 18th and 19th centuries alongside natural history collecting, and the Victorian era made it a popular craft: and Walter Potter arranged kittens and rabbits in human scenes in his museum of curiosities in Sussex. In the early 20th century Carl Akeley's habitat groups for the American Museum of Natural History set new standards of realism.
Artists use taxidermy to question how people look at and own animals. Robert Rauschenberg set a stuffed angora goat with a tyre around its middle on a painted platform in Monogram (1955–59). Maurizio Cattelan hung a stuffed horse from a ceiling harness in Novecento (1997), and Kate Clark gives animal bodies human faces. Look for the tension between a lifelike pose and evident death.
